News, Analysis and Perspective for Solution Providers and Technology Integrators

Google Docs Outage Impacted 'Thousands' Of Users And Channel Partners

"A significant subset" of Google Docs users on Wednesday were locked out of their files when the service went down for a little over an hour. Channel partners and business customers were among those impacted by the service disruption.

Thousands of Google Docs users experienced a service disruption on Wednesday evening, which impacted businesses users as well as channel partners.

The downtime started several minutes before 4 p.m. EST on Wednesday and lasted between 30 minutes to just over an hour for most users, Google said. During the outage, which the internet giant confirmed impacted a "significant subset of users," Google Docs, the popular document creation and editing tool, rendered access to files inaccessible to thousands of its users.

Google said that the Docs service was back up for most users by Wednesday night. As of Thursday, the internet giant's service status webpage said that the outage had been fully resolved.

"We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support," Google said in a statement. "Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better."

A Google partner that spoke under the condition of anonymity said that out of its 400 business customers, six were impacted by the service interruption. The solution provider, a Google user itself, was also personally impacted by the outage.

For its part, Google is responsive and communicative to its partner base, according to an executive for the solution provider organization. As such, the organization was able to pass along communications from Google to its impacted customers.

"Our support team was in touch with Google's support [team] and we were able to be proactive with our customers and communicate updates and resolution," the executive said. "Google is very stable; however, everyone has issues. But Google's support process [for partners] is good."

Other G-Suite products, such as Gmail and Google Drive, remained up and running at the same time as the Docs outage. However, many users reported login, access, and syncing issues with Google Docs.

As of publication time, Google has not publicly commented on the cause of the Google Docs outage.